Logistics is the New Software

Every consumer company WILL be a logistics company. Logistics is the new software. 

Yes!

Let that sink in.

The ‘legacy software’ way of running supply chain and logistics is no longer viable for the present ‘on-demand’ world. It needs a new ‘operating system’ to run on.

Building such a ‘system’ requires ground-up innovation and first principles thinking. We, at Locus, embarked on this journey five years ago and today I am proud to announce more partners who believe in our mission of building a future-ready supply chain platform.

We recently raised our Series C funding of $50 million. The round was led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures and existing investors Tiger Global and Falcon Edge.

Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs, Kunal Shah, CEO of Cred, Raju Reddy, founder of Sierra Atlantic, and Deb Deep Sengupta, former President & MD, SAP South Asia, also participated in the round, to guide us in building a global technology brand.

Our investors bring to the table their enormous experience in supporting and building world-class products and they come with patient capital.

Patient Capital

In a world where quick fixes are the norm, changing the face of a legacy industry needs resilience, ground up research, and patient capital.

We’ve filed for over 10 patents, and look to double that count this year with the infusion of additional capital. Since our inception, we’ve been a strong research-focused company, and this funding will give us more arsenal to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation. We will hire more PhDs and developers to fortify our technology team. This focus on bolstering our tech team will eventually translate to more accurate ‘real-world’ decision-making for our clients in their day-to-day operations.

We will aggressively build our local Customer Success & Business Development teams in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. This will allow us to serve our enterprise customers across geographies, with the nuance of each region and in their language.

What is the future of supply chain and logistics?

This isn’t an academic question. This keeps every single innovator at Locus up and thinking at night. After a lot of debates, discussions, and mulling over, we’ve finally come down to one word – Proactivity.

Let me explain why.

Before that, a slight detour. 

A key change that has been brewing over a period of time is how the end customer has increasingly become the center of the supply chain. Further in a global and connected supply chain, a small disruption at an arbitrary point has a butterfly effect, with far reaching impacts. We got glimpses of this a few months into the pandemic and the recent Suez Canal incident. Brands now need to make more complex decisions in less time to run the modern supply chain efficiently.

Brands, over a period of time, have started to realize this and have begun to question their existing supply chain strategies.

It is now increasingly becoming clear that the supply chain is and will be the big difference between competing brands. The split-second decisions that supply chain and logistics personnel have to take every day are becoming more complex as they involve a lot of variable factors. It is impossible for a human to consider all scenarios and arrive at a decision.  You need robust proactive systems in place to tackle this situation. 

Proactivity

One of our recent innovations is NodeIQ. It is an end-to-end engine to enable intelligent network design. A brand no longer needs to go to consultants to come up with answers for questions like “Where can I build my next warehouse?” or “What should I do to build a sustainable supply chain?”. With NodeIQ, they can do it faster in-house and also at a much lower cost. Brands can now be proactive.

Another recent release of ours is FieldIQ. It tackles the changing scenario in the home services and retail fulfillment operations. Brands now need to cater to dynamic demands, design smart territories, and update them on a weekly basis vs annually earlier. Again, we are enabling companies in this sector to be proactive.

Our flagship products DispatchIQ and TrackIQ that help with last-mile requirements for brands are getting better with more specialized data sets, faster and more efficient algorithms covering a larger number of real-world use cases. Is there a vehicle breakdown for one of your riders, no worries, we’ll get the nearest ones to share the load so that the customer SLAs aren’t affected. Again, proactive.

Our products are putting the end customer at the center and have given our clients the means to proactively cater to their needs, while caring for the environment.

Sustainability

If enabling proactive supply chain decisions is one big mission, the other mission that is close to our hearts is sustainability. We are working closely with our clients on their sustainability initiatives. It gives us immense pleasure when we look at the impact we’ve created.

We’ve reduced 70 million+ kilometers in distance traveled for clients across sectors.

To put that in perspective, it is equivalent to covering the circumference of the earth 1746 times or the carbon emission sequestered by 20,000+ acres of forest in an entire year.

By the customers, for the customers

All this would not have been possible without our world-class customers. Over the years, brands like BigBasket, Nestle, Mondelez, The Tata Group, Unilever, and many others, have placed their faith in us. At this important moment, I would like to thank them for providing us with some incredible learnings over the years.

I’d also want to thank our team. What began as 10 folks in an apartment is now more than 200 teammates across three continents. Each one of us is a tinkerer at heart. We are innovators.

Looking forward to building the Operating System of Logistics!